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We chose to address how everyday products affect water pollution as well as how we can minimize daily impact on our water supply.

A high-volume product that every household uses, like laundry detergent, has a high concentration of chemicals and can have harmful effects on the environment.

By creating an eco-friendly, wallet-friendly laundry detergent, we can displace a large amount of harmful material from entering our water supply, and avoid hurting fish and other animals, including humans, as well as the land.

We wanted to find an environmentally-friendly solution to a daily problem that would not only educate and involve our community, but would help some people in need around us in a high-volume way.

Step 5: Team members will lead school-wide (appx. 800 students) service project to make more laundry detergent for other shelters around Atlanta on March 16th as part of Westminster’s Public Purpose Fair

Step 6: Team members will provide detergent recipe for students to use in their own homes

We enlisted a class of fourth graders to decorate the packaging, used cereal boxes, which helped teach them the importance of recycling and reusing waste, as well as gave us an opportunity to share our project with them and educate about our detergent.

After we chose an easy and environmentally friendly recipe, we bought ingredients and made detergent together.

Trying to keep the resources used as low-impact as possible, we brought in old cereal boxes. We worked with a science class of 4th grade Westminster students, who decorated reused paper to put on the boxes, and we told them about our project and the recipe. The 4th graders have been studying homelessness this year.

After seeing the success of our project, our school is adding it as a school-wide project which will take place on March 16th. There, 3rd through 12th grade Westminster students will see how to make the detergent and will donate large amounts to several homeless shelters around Atlanta.

We then packaged the detergent in the cereal boxes and delivered it to Central Presbyterian Night Shelter in downtown Atlanta.

We learned how to make our own eco-friendly detergent, which team members can now make in their homes!

Making homemade laundry detergent provides an eco-friendly solution, but also a cheap and effective one.

Only a tablespoon is needed to get clean clothes, meaning a little goes a long way. Homemade laundry detergent costs very little, only about five cents per load, making it an economical choice as well.

When we tested our detergent, it performed just as well as store-bought laundry detergent without the toxic and harmful chemicals. Being environmentally friendly was easier than we expected, and we saw that store-bought brands are not necessarily better.

By providing eco-friendly laundry detergent to replace the shelter’s chemical-heavy detergent, we decrease the number of chemicals put into our natural water sources. These chemicals cause cultural eutrophication and thereby loss of life for aquatic plants and fish.

This also saves the shelter the money that would have been spent on laundry detergent.

Our project will expand into a school-wide function on March 16. This will spread awareness of the harmful effects of regular store-bought detergents in our own community and will increase the volume of our eco-friendly detergent to spread to shelters around Atlanta.

One challenge we faced was deciding how much detergent to make; we wanted to optimize the number of loads without overstocking the shelter’s stores.

Another challenge was expanding the project to the rest of our community. We decided to include the Elementary School students because both the sustainable and philanthropic motives behind this project are important issues for children to be aware of as they grow and mature.

Some students were skeptical of the effectiveness of our homemade detergent, but after testing, it was proven to work just as well as store-bought detergent.